Straight to Video
Rock Art Rock
See more in the Rock Art Rock gallery.
polls
Loading ...
Went to See the Gypsy
Way back last decade, at the end of 2008 to be exact, I predicted a column on the gypsy as portrayed in rock ‘n’ soul. Well, let’s just say it took me a while to distinguish voodoo from hoodoo, and a true-blooded gypsy from a down-home fortune teller or conjurer. This literally colorful archetype has faded from popularity in song since her blues roots and ’60s and ’70s rock peak as a theme, a time when her style became rock iconic thanks to Cher, Linda Ronstadt, and Stevie Nicks, to name a few. But I predict she’ll make a comeback, in that kind of everything old is new again way. Not that I believe in future predictions or anything, but simply for entertainment purposes, I’ve prepared this first column of the first month of the first year of the new decade as a token of health, happiness, and prosperity, in tribute to gypsies young and old (without actually consulting one).
Let it be a given by now that when we talk of the origins of rock we’re talking largely about the blues, an idiom in which the gypsy is a well-known character, her ways and means a favored subject. But we’d never leave the settlement if we dwell here too long, so like the gypsies, we’re just going to pass through: “Gypsy Glass Blues” by Ida Cox, in which the blueswoman learns that someone’s put a hoodoo (or a curse) on her, according to what she sees in the crystal ball, dates back to 1927. Furry Lewis was talking gypsies in “Black Gypsy Blues” in the ’20s as well, though it wasn’t the kindest portrayal: “My woman must be a black gypsy / She knows every place I go.” Robert Johnson’s songs are famously filled with references to the magic of the conjurers and to local hoodoo practice. In the ’30s, Memphis Minnie admonished, “Don’t put that thing on me,” in her “Hoodoo Lady.” Then along came Muddy Waters: “You know the gypsy woman told me that you your mother’s bad luck child.” “Gypsy Woman” from 1947 began a long catalog of songs by him that often told of the tools of the conjurer and hoodoo practitioner—the mojo hands and John the Conqueroo of African-American/Creole folk magic. “Hoochie Coochie Man” from 1954 refers to the gypsy woman’s prediction of a lucky seventh son and his later signature number, “I’ve Got My Mojo Working”, declares, “I got a gypsy woman giving me advice.”
The Eddie Kramer Woodstock Experience
.jpg "Eddie Kramer at Electric Lady Studios in 1970")
What would Jimi be doing if he were alive today? It’s a question I’ll often ask myself and anyone else who I perceive to have a view on the subject. And I don’t just mean musically. I mean, like, what would he literally be doing right this minute? What would he think about the new mother earth, the change of climate, and other concerns of his songs from back in 1967? Would he really just lay back and groove on a rainy day, really not mind if the sun refused to shine? That kind of thing. Does this make me the best person to interview Hendrix’s left-hand studio man, Eddie Kramer, for 20 minutes on the subject of recording three days of the historic Woodstock festival? Maybe not, but even with my interest in a Hendrix eye-view on things and Kramer’s determination to steer me off the astral plane and back to upstate New York 40 years ago, we decided to meet somewhere in the middle and have a chat about Hendrix, the concert, and Hendrix’s headline appearance at it.
Kramer’s name is synonymous with the three studio albums by the Jimi Hendrix Experience: Are You Experienced?, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland, as well as his Band of Gyspys, and the immediately posthumous The Cry of Love, among other Hendrix-related projects. But Kramer’s production and engineering achievements extend far beyond Electric Lady, the New York recording studio he helped build from the ground up with Hendrix. He also established a long association with Led Zeppelin that endured through the band’s final studio collection, Coda. It was shortly after recording Led Zeppelin II, whereon he and Jimmy Page cooked up that that weird mid-section in “Whole Lotta Love”, that Kramer got the call to come up to Woodstock. “I guess because I’d recorded Hendrix and he was the superstar closer, and the fact I had a fairly lengthy rep for being a halfway decent recording engineer in the live field, they thought it would be a good fit.” (Notice it is he who brings up Hendrix first, not me.) Kramer describes the time at Yasgur’s Farm as “three days of drugs and hell” and the conditions for recording there a “battlefield.” Yet among the stellar performances he captured on tape were the career-making set by Santana (at the time just an upstart guitarist with an interestingly heavy percussive band), an against-all-odds 2am tour de triumph by Janis Joplin, and an ecstatic revue by Sly & the Family Stone. The three sets, along with those of the Jefferson Airplane and Johnny Winter, have been freshly packaged as The Woodstock Experience, available individually or in a box, and are what we’ve actually convened to talk about—except for when I lead the conversation astray.
Jimi Hendrix 1968
Originally published in The New York Times, March 1968
“Will he burn it tonight?” asked a neat blonde of her boyfriend, squashed in beside her on the packed floor of the Fillmore auditorium. “He did at Monterey,” the boyfriend said, recalling the Pop Festival at which the guitarist, in a moment of elation, actually put a match to his guitar. The blonde and her boyfriend went on watching the stage, crammed with huge silver-fronted Fender amps, a double drum set, and whispering stage hands. Mitch Mitchell, the drummer, came on first, sat down, smiled, and adjusted his cymbals. Then came bassist Noel Redding, gold glasses glinting on his fair, delicate face, and plugged into his amp.
“There he is,” said the blonde, and yes, said the applause, there he was, Jimi Hendrix, a cigarette slouched in his mouth, dressed in tight black pants draped with a silver belt, and a pale rainbow shirt half hidden by a black leather vest.
It’s Richie Havens’ World
“For some odd reason, I know everybody,” says Richie Havens.
Whether it was destiny or a cosmic hiccup, the musical climax of the ’60s was an auspicious day for Havens when an unplanned three-hour set opening the Woodstock Festival opened his doorway to worldwide recognition. “We landed, they chased me, I went on,” he explains. And yet, even if things hadn’t gone down that way, Havens would still have made his mark on rock history as a graduate of the original Greenwich Village folk scene, as a writer and interpreter of substantive songs, and as the third point in the magic triangle that connects Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.
“I gave him the words to that,” says Havens, speaking of Hendrix and “All Along the Watchtower”, the song Havens still uses to open all his shows. The first song Havens ever covered by Dylan was “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”; he’s since reworked “If Not For You”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “Lay Lady Lay”, “Maggie’s Farm”, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, and, most recently, “Tombstone Blues” for the surreal biopic I’m Not There in which he also appeared. As for Hendrix, Havens first witnessed him in action in an uptown club and was so impressed, he hipped him to the Village scene. “I did share that with him—that he didn’t need to be a studio musician, at the whim of everyone else—that he could be in his own band… that’s how we started out knowing each other.”
Hendrix Graffiti
The first time I saw Jimi Hendrix, I was eight years old and he scared me. Really scared me. I wanted to leave, go home, and watch The Monkees or The Archies just to dilute the scary substance that was now inside me. I saw Hendrix in a dive theater where my dad had taken me to see the film American Graffiti—it had just come out, and it was his scene, right down to the film’s location. I think Hendrix scared my dad, too. But being a good father, he didn’t show it. Thank god it was a matinee…
That day I learned many new and frightening things, like the word “Bijou,” the name of the broken-bulbed, ratty-screened cinema where, prior to the main flick, they played a trailer for a Jimi Hendrix documentary. I’m still not fond of the word because I always associate it with that dive, which seemed to almost exclusively feature ’70s soft-core porn—even that could not redeem the place. More importantly, I learned that music sometimes didn’t just appear—friendly-like, and with a warm smile. Music sometimes showed up furiously, angrily launching itself from speaker to ear with a bruising velocity. Sometimes music thumped my entire torso with a single beat. And the beats that came after made me wonder what would happen if it never stopped. This is what the music of Jimi Hendrix, cut up into pieces and shoved through a broken sound system, did to me as I sat in a threadbare, squeaky cinema chair that I weighed just enough to hold down. I honestly thought I was going to vomit—of course, the popcorn was pretty bad.
To accompany this assault, I saw smoky images of a black man with an electric guitar wearing stitched-together circus costumes—and it didn’t look silly in the least, it looked like it fit the soundtrack. He pumped his guitar like he wanted to break it with his crotch. In the end, he didn’t break it; he burned it alive and worshipped the fire. And the band kept playing. What kind of band keeps playing when there’s a fire and an arsonist together on stage? Talk about being overshadowed by a fire demon Strat-fucker. When the trailer was over, there was only the sound of the projector, and a couple whispers of righteousness somewhere behind me in the dark. Though I wished all the lights would come on, I found the quiet roll of the projector soothing. Like the smoky silence after a dentist’s drilling, or the whipped quietude after a harsh breakup, there was a measured relief. At least I’ll never have to go through that again. Still, the music was now in me, maybe worse—maybe some rock-fire parasite was now implanted in my viscera, and when I wake up in the morning, I may look like that kid that could barely hold a cinema seat down, but on the inside I am towering in shiny metallic purple armor.
Previously Unreleased Jimi Hendrix Studio Recordings Coming Our Way
by: Jocelyn Hoppa
March 9th will see the release of Valleys of Neptune, a 12-song collection of unreleased Jimi Hendrix studio recordings (most taken from several 1969 sessions) via Sony’s Legacy Recordings. The album marks the launch of the 2010 Jimi Hendrix Catalog Project, a partnership between the label and Experience Hendrix LLC. The songs were originally recorded and newly remixed by Eddie Kramer.
Album highlights include the title track “Valleys of Neptune”, “Here My Train A Comin’”, an instrumental version of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love”, “Red House, and “Mr. Bad Luck.” read more
by: Jocelyn Hoppa
published: January 11, 2010
in column: What Goes On
no comments yet
Tags: